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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

D6: Facebook - Making Sharing Easy

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook finished out the afternoon at the D conference. Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook is about helping people share information and share themselves. He talked about how important he thought privacy was in getting people to share information. Both discussed how they ended up at the company and at how they see Facebook helping people become more social.

Zuckerberg talked about how he hadn't really thought that Facebook was going to be a big site as soon as it happened. In one story, he talked about how he hadn't been to an art class at Harvard, so instead he built a web site, and told the other students he built a study guide; their information let him pass the class. Sandberg talked about moving from the treasury department to Google and being impressed by the focus of the founders, and said she saw the same thing in Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg talked about how he thought he should be CEO because it was his vision the company was executing on. He discussed how they built a platform for applications to further the goal of sharing information. From the Beacon ad-serving situation, which got lots of negative press, he said he learned about the importance of giving people control over the information they are sharing.

He said they built a platform because they didn't have the resources to build all of the applications they wanted to within Facebook. He said it grew a lot faster than they thought it would - including up to 350,000 developers. He talked about how iLike built a music application; and how others built games, which is very important to a lot of users. When asked about more serious applications, he pointed to applications that raise money for causes. In general, he said he thought the internet was moving to a lot of smaller pieces of information, such as status updates and mobile phone pictures.

Sandberg pointed out that if 20 million people like the system, that itself was a serious application. She talked about a promotion for Ben and Jerry's free cone day that reached 53 million impressions through people telling their friends what flavors they liked, sending free cones, etc.

Zuckerberg said he saw Facebook as a technology company, not a media company, because the focus was on building things. The original version of the platform was based on developers creating boxes that people could install on their pages. With the new version, they want to make sure the application developers create things that are trustworthy and useful to users. More engaging and more trusted applications will be more easily spread through the system.

In response to a question about how sites like Facebook deal with privacy and its impact on society, Zuckerberg talked about how people had control and were only sharing the information with the people they want to. A huge amount of users are tweaking their own privacy settings, he said. On cyberbullying, Sandberg said Facebook brought more things to light, and thus could be useful. Among applications, Zuckerberg said he hoped he would see were those for sports, politics, and religion.

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